Rachel McCormick - The Desert Between Us

 

I spent my honeymoon in a tent, in the desert, alone. It was the summer of 2010, and I had just married the man of my dreams. He was funny, smart and caring. He didn't really speak much English, but I figured, “Hey, that was something we could work on.” [audience laughter] 

 

We had met four years earlier on a soccer field in Poughkeepsie, New York, as I ate a mango on a stick and nursed a sprained ankle. When the game was over, Irvi came up to me and he heaved me over his shoulders, so I wouldn't have to limp through the mud and I was in love. [audience laughter] I later learned that Irvi had come to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, one week before September 11th, 2001. He had come here by crossing the desert between Sonora and Arizona on foot. 

 

Because of this, some people call him illegal. Other people say that he doesn't have papers. He has plenty of papers, birth certificate, diplomas, tax returns. But none of those papers authorize him to live in the United States. Because of this, Irvi can't travel. He rarely leaves the confines of New York City, because he fears deportation. Fear is a big part of Irvi's life and it's rooted in several near-death attempts to cross the border. In the months leading up to our marriage, we would sit on the couch and he would tell these stories of having to drink all sorts of nasty things to stay alive in the desert, like water from car radiators, and water from cow tanks and even water from his own pee. 

 

He told this one story about getting lost in the mountains, and having to slaughter a goat from somebody's ranch and roast it over tumbleweeds under the light of the moon. Knowing all of this, a few weeks before our wedding, I told Irvi that I wanted to honeymoon alone in the desert on the border in the same place he had nearly died several times. His reaction, like most other people's, was “Why?” [audience laughter] Well, one level, I wanted to have one last adventure before I had a bunch of his beautiful babies. I figured that traveling to the desert was the only thing I could do ethically while my new husband stayed at home working 12-hour shifts as a busboy. I also wanted to see with my own two eyes this border that had transformed Irvi from a human being into an illegal alien. 

 

So, in honor of Irvi’s struggle, I packed a bag and I went to the desert south of Tucson, Arizona to volunteer for two weeks with the organization, No More Deaths, which, among other things, seeks to end human suffering on the US-Mexico border. When I got there, I thought I knew what to expect based on the tales that Irvi and his friends had told of their perilous journeys. I had even written my senior thesis at Vassar about narratives of violence on the US- Mexico border, back in those days when I thought I knew everything. But I was not expecting this. 

 

What lay south of the airport and the urban sprawl of Tucson, looked more like a cross between a science fiction movie and footage from a foreign war zone than the country I thought I knew. Don't get me wrong. It was absolutely beautiful. Not sand, like the Sahara, but bright maroon soil and prickly green plants and animals that howled. As I pitched my tent in the middle of this beauty, I started to notice other things too. Like, the helicopters that constantly flew overhead and the Border Patrol agents that would jump out of bushes and point their guns at anything that moved, including me. 

 

Their weapons should have scared me, but unfortunately, I realized that as a white woman, I was probably safe. Whereas somebody brown like Irvi certainly wasn't. In those two weeks in the desert, I thought a lot about Irvi. He was my only real connection between what was happening on the border and was happening at home in New York. I thought about Irvi as he danced at our wedding, and I also thought about him as he cried at our wedding because none of his family could be there. It wasn't just Irvi that I thought about. I thought about the millions of other people who had made the same decision as him to leave their families behind and walk north. 

 

In my first week in the desert, I didn't actually meet any of these migrants, but I saw signs of their presence all around. I saw their footprints in dry riverbeds and discarded backpacks everywhere, filled with Red Bull and children's toys and photographs. And in the middle of all this, my task was to work with other volunteers from No More Deaths to leave jugs of water in different spots in the desert. Because if you decide to walk from Mexico over the mountains to some US Interstate to get picked up, it's physically impossible to bring enough water with you to survive. So, the volunteers and I would spend the daylight hours leaving hundreds of gallons of water in different places, hoping that people would find them and drink them and stay alive.

 

At night, we would sleep under the stars as the desert came to life with javelinas and rattlesnakes and so many different people from so many different places, walking north. It wasn't until my second to last day in the desert that I actually met one of the people I was trying to help. I had been walking a trail with a couple of other volunteers when we heard this faint groan in the bushes to our right. As we got closer to the noise, we could see that there was a man there, lying on his back and struggling to keep his eyes from rolling into the back of his head. 

 

As I got even closer, I could see that his lips were cracked and his complexion was nearly gray. I was in shock. All I could think to do was to stare at this man and to check to see if he was alive. And as I looked at his face, I could have sworn that I saw Irvi, my new husband, so far from home and yet so close to death. And on the flight back to New York, all I can think about was this man, where had he come from? Where had he been going? Had he survived the damages of dehydration and exposure? And I wondered, how had Irvi survived. I'll probably never really know, but frankly, I'm just glad that he did. Thank you.